Subterranean Online, Summer (July-September) 2010 (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents & review

Whole magazine is online here - fiction & non-fiction. I only cover fiction below.

Table of contents (7 stories, best first, unread last).

Links on author fetch more of author's fiction. My rating is in brackets.

1. [novelette] K J Parker's "Amor Vincit Omnia" (B); download; magic: What's most threatening to authority, government? A citizen who's beyond the government's power to hurt. This story is of a government going after a man who's beyond hurt, not resting till he's destroyed. Man himself is a monster, but that's not why the government will destroy him.
   
   Humanity is divided into two: mostly normal humans, & some wizards. Wizards have an institution - Studium, where fresh blood with talent is educated. Studium, or a larger body it's part of, is also the wizard government. They've just found out about an untrained wizard equipped with the ultimate defense against every form of attack. That's why he needs to be destroyed.
   
   Caution: Initial parts use far too much of ... is it Latin? I don't know the language, but almost gave up. Those funny words cease to be an issue once the story picks up.
2. [novella] Mike Resnick's "Six Blind Men and an Alien" (B); download: This is really a collection of half dozen independent alien visitation stories. Mostly mundane, but two may be worth a look: "What the Sound Man Saw" & "What Nobody Saw".
3. [ff] Lawrence Block's "A Burglar's-Eye View of Greed" (C); download; non-genre: A rant on why money is bad.
4. Lucius Shepard's "The Taborin Scale"; download: Not read.
5. Jay Lake's "Dream of the Arrow"; download: Not read.
6. Cory Doctorow's "Ghosts In My Head"; download: Not read.
7. Rachel Swirsky's "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window"; download: Not read.

Related: Fiction from Subterranean Online.